Guest post by Basiruddin Syed, Product Marketing Manager, IBM Social Media Analytics.The creation of online communities and social media sites has changed the way we look at brands and products. Organizations have also learned how monitoring can help them use social channels more effectively. The problem is that companies aren’t necessarily doing it right. Monitoring is a first step, but there is a shift happening that is taking things a bit further.

Have you noticed how it feels when you ask a friend how they are, and the response is, " I'm okay"? It feels like they are giving you a canned response and may not be sharing everything with you. Do you leave it at that and accept this surface level response (monitoring) or do you engage in a deeper, more meaningful conversation to discover more about their feelings and gain insights you didn’t know (engagement)?

Many users of social media love to express their experiences, thoughts and opinions, often to a point of "oversharing." While monitoring these expressions can give you a sense of current sentiment, it also places you in the center of a lot of extraneous information. When such conversations are happening, we need to extract the meaningful conversations relevant to the business and eliminate the “noise” to answer important business questions, such as:

What are customers saying about our new product? (R&D)

What is my company’s reputation for acquiring new talent? (HR)

What are my customers complaining about? How can we fine tune our message to reach them better? (Marketing – Customer Service)

What kind of reputation do my partners have? (Supply Chain)

What if I can show you a way to harness social media to effect enterprise-wide changes that boost ROI and empower you to take definitive business action and convert the “Okay” into “Good!” or “Great!”?

IBM has a unique, purpose-built Cloud solution called IBM Social Media Analytics designed for business users. It can help you gain a rich, deep understanding of your customers’ opinions and sentiment as well as detail amazing demographic data and evolving topics or trends. It goes far beyond social monitoring and can take your organization into the realm of advanced analytics to help you better know your customers, market, trends and competition.

With the latest version filled with new features -- a clean user interface and new, reporting tables as well as the addition of the Brazillian Portuguese and Russian languages in its sentiment analysis portfolio -- there has never been a better time to give IBM Social Media Analytics a try.

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